Visiting an artist community in Mexico has thought me to be open to new view points. It also made me see how I can create sustainable awareness through art and community.

As a young boy, I often visited industries with my father to observe and understand how raw materials are transformed into finished products ready to be used for human wants. At the same time, the plentiful dust, smoke, and malodorous effluents aired by the industries marred the horizon, leaving me disappointed and concerned for the environment. Thus, I developed an inclination at an early age toward these critical issues stemming from the interaction between humans and the environment.

Ten years ago, I participated in a "campus abroad" program with my university which led me to today : being at the center of the cleantech ecosystem to boost the adoption of green and profitable technologies. I was studying business at HEC Montréal, all my friends were targeting the big fours to become consultants or giant companies to join their marketing or strategy teams... but in my case, after a few internships in corporations, I felt I should use my knowledge and motivation for other purposes. Increasing the profit of multinationals was not really my thing, I used to say that I wanted to do something else than getting up in the morning to find new ways to commercialize a shampoo or a pack of chips! This specific "campus abroad" program was about "Sustainable Businesses". Indeed, for a couple of weeks, we would attend Brazilian universities seminars and visit companies recognized for their sustainable development practices. The objective of that program was to produce a business plan on waste management and support the marketing of local arts and crafts. For the first time, I saw how my background could actually be useful for the common good ! Since that day, I dedicated my career in supporting sustainable businesses: e.i. cleantech companies only, and I never regretted it.

Did you know that 50% of all oxygen we breath comes from the oceans? I was told so by my dive instructor when I started scuba diving 6 years ago. Also, the ocean stores massive amounts of CO2, a perfect sink. These facts and my experience of a world submerged, was an inflection point, #myahamoment, that helped kickoff my transformation towards sustainable circularity.

Although I had been thinking about sustainability for some years and had some experience working for a social impact foundation (FairChain Foundation), my ‘aha moment’ came in September 2021 when I had just started in a financial position with a healthcare organization.  Over the span of a couple of days I started feeling like a misfit and I knew some reflection on my emotions would be appropriate. Digging a bit, I realized responsibilities regarding the climate and biodiversity crisis we all now experience fall down on those capable of taking action, which includes me personally. Strangely, I had never felt personally responsible. For the first time, blocking those emotions did not feel like an option I could live with any longer. It must have been environment I was in contrasted with my values and beliefs about the state of the world. Realizing this included me personally made me feel the burden of that responsibility very strongly all of a sudden. I was terrified, but decided to take bold action and quit my new job. This was in the same week, unsure what would be my next steps. Having done a small assignment for the Metabolic spin-off Dayrize, I had Marta Kołodziejczak (then Sustainability Manager at Dayrize) in my network whom I asked to mentor me in finding the right positioning and personal leverage in tackling sustainability issues (for which I am very grateful).  With the help of the 80.000 Hours eight week career planning course and Marta her help during our Vondelpark stroll or cup of tea sessions, I found some first goals to pursue in my now sustainability dedicated career path. “Climate fatalism is for the faded and the deflated, it is a ‘bourgeois luxury’” - as philosopher Andreas Malm put it using the words of Jonas Gren. Climate despair is a strong undercurrent in our lives. I realized is no longer acceptable to myself to deny it and fall slowly into the hopeless and inactive state of climate fatalism. Rather, we should capitalize on despair and go for constructive efforts.

At The Haven, Cortez, Colorado

Shortly after I’ve started my business and economics bachelor’s degree, I started to become sceptical about the business-as-usual practises that we were taught, and about the dominant neo-liberal paradigm deeply entrenched in our economic system. I kept thinking to myself - how is it not obvious to everyone that we cannot pursue an unlimited economic growth on a planet that does NOT keep growing? Is this really the only way forward? About the same time, I heard from a friend that there’s this student society Enactus at my university in which students get together to solve societal problems through building social enterprises. This sounded like something that I should try out amid my frustration - and that’s also when my AHA moment happened, as I started to learn about the different ways in which businesses can be used as a force for good. An initial hobby turned into a passion, then into a dedicated master’s degree, and then into a career at a systems change agency Metabolic.

My aha moment started when I was a child and watched a David Attenborough film in the cinema. I cried at the final scene with the polar bear and her cubs all alone in melting sea of loose ice. Then I went to school and university and learned to accept that ‘this is the way things are’. I got taught strategies to focused on winning, ego, gaining, growth. It wasn’t until my burn-out a few years after graduating that I realised my activist spirit and love for this Earth got hijacked by the system. I then decided to make the big change and started living the way I wanted, started to work on meaningful projects only. Nowadays I feel fully alive and connected to myself, to nature. A feather this small can make me wonder and cry out of awe.

It has been a long process... In 2011 I was in Madrid when the 10M (Anti-austerity Movement) took place and it triggered something in me. It made me think that the current system is only leading us to a dead end and I realized that there are also many people in the world who think the same way, willing to promote change. From there I started to think about the impact I could have as a Designer and focus my career on causes I believe in.

My aha moment was at high school, in chemistry class actually. It was when I first worked with the so-called Binas (Dutch high school people know what I mean). It's a book full of details about biology, physics and chemistry. It fascinated and still fascinates me nowadays how the world functions with so many types of materials, fluids, physical flows and all their characteristics. It triggered me to think about how the world functions and what we should do to preserve it. Honestly, the Binas is still a book which is just epic to have and to browse in every now and then!

When I was younger, I had a friend from my running club that really wanted to make a difference and I remember, when we were training, she was talking to me about a documentary where they were talking about all emissions we were generating as humans. She talked to me about things like vertical farming and I remember thinking that I should do something similar for the planet or at least be part of the movement. I then went into environmental engineering and during my first internship in wastewater treatment in Delft, I had the chance to visit De Ceuvel and this is what inspired me more and why I am here 4 years later. (picture of my first visit at De Ceuvel in 2018)

This was more a nascent "aha" moment, I think it was when the seed was planted, and it took much longer to germinate and take articulate form. When I was 16 I went on a trip to Kenya and Rwanda with my family. It was a lavish, neo-colonial style trip which impacted the people in my family in various ways. We saw the migrating wildebeast on safari, took helicopters to visit people who lived high up on red-colored mountains, and met the Virungan gorillas. All of it was unbelievably impressive and the beauty and vastness of nature was a force there entirely unlike anything I had felt before. However, the thing that struck me most was the humanity around us. I specifically remember being in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and after visiting the national museum and memorial to the horrific genocide that took place there, noticing that all around us the city was impeccably clean. The people we met were all so warm, they seemed to move with an ease and a good humor or kindness that I didn't often feel in my own usual surroundings. I was surprised by this, having been educated in America to think that these places were "impoverished" and America the bastion of all things great. And of course, in monetary, fiscal terms there was (some) truth there. But I had this intuitive feeling that there was something so wrong with a system that could label this as impoverished, not seeing the great value in what was there.

My 'aha' moment was when I participated to leadership retreat in Chamonix as part of an impact scaling global entrepreneurship program. I had already developed expertise in circular economy and systems thinking however did not know how I could connect these with my 'by nature' skills; communication and community building. As we were surrounded by the beautiful mountains of Alps and global community of impact driven leaders the atmosphere was suitable to share, learn from each other and practice my purpose in life . Since then I build communities of practice, guide people/corporations/cities on sustainability and enable leaders to take actions towards systemic change and circularity.

My aha-moment was more of a WTF moment around 2002, when I was confronted with my own reflex to reach for the PU foam gun to correct a design flaw in my tiny “eco” house, rather than solving it elegantly… (By the way: congrats Metabolic!!)

In 2010 I did a course to further develop my programme management skills. By the time I finished the course I wanted to run programmes instead of teams. Aiming for something specific, finding budgets and tools, building alliances and getting things done felt like a perfect fit. The first programme available was about sustainable operations. Thinking about smarter and cleaner ways to deal with coffee cups, with buildings and energy, with the office waste from my colleagues. Setting aims and targets, drafting action plans and making a difference. I think that was the 'aha' moment, when I realised that my actions created real impact. Sustainability got under my skin, and it never left. Now, more than a decade later, I'm at the very best spot I can be, stimulating international circular economy. My work is about what I think is most important for this planet, I am challenged to use all my talents, skills and expertise to create impact, I can 'programme' my own activities and I get to see the world in the process. Sustainability brought me so much, but most important is that I get to meet so many engaged people. Like some from the beautiful Metabolic team and particularly Eva, what a joy and pleasure!

Like most children I was aware of polution, the decay of the ozon layer, animal cruelty, hunger at young age. But when you get older you realize these are complex problems that you cannot solve on your own. There are no clear solutions and you are never quite doing enough. That kind of killed my motivation to save the world. My aha moment came in 2018 on a ship during Springtij Forum with a group of young professionals that all had the same dreams of improving our systems for a better world and also similar doubts about how to make the biggest impact. That week on the ship made me believe that change is possible if we keep in mind that doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of us went on to have careers in sustainability and even if we still fly occassionaly, eat dairy, buy new clothes from time to time I believe we are making a positive impact.

Mine was during graduate school, where I was studying sediments from lakes in order to understand past climatic changes in small catchment areas. The more I understood the timescales of natural changes, the more it made sense to me that anthropogenic climate change is an unprecedented phenomenon on our planet in terms of the rates of change it has led to. After understanding the science, I had the "aha!" moment to pivot into climate science and hope to have a career in climate policy or consulting.

My ‘aha’ moment! The moment that put me on a path to a sustainability career was documenting women farmers' stories at ActionAid. I immersed myself in the Cushitic communities in Isiolo, Kenya, for 3 months in 2014 to capture their daily rhythm. Seeing how well connected they were to their land and willing to invest time and energy to protect soil health was amazing. Their eyes glowed with news of sustainable crop varieties, improved farming practices, and pointers to farming in harmony with nature. Everyday conversations revolved around giving the best to their farms and creating a better future for their children. With the area being primarily semi-arid, tact mattered in ensuring food security for the community. That’s when it clicked that sustainability is not a sciency thing for experts only. Everyone and every profession have a role to play in achieving a sustainable future. As a communicator, my role is to tell the story of hope that we have the solutions we need to protect the planet and future generations if we apply ourselves. Are you in a sustainability career? What made you take on this path? Join the #myahamoment campaign with Metabolic by sharing what sparked you to take your journey of #buildingabetterfuture. Image by ActionAid

Next to my work in mental healthcare I organized cultural events, festivals and parties together with our collective KONIJN. One October night in October 2013, together with Peter Duran I organized a party on Urban Decay and Rebirth in the, a celebration of Detroit House and Berlin Techno. This all happened at a time of economic downturn still thanks to the financial crisis of 2008, a building stop in Amsterdam, with much debate around empty spaces, buildings and land. We wanted to include stories that would provide hope and showed we could take action ourselves. So we invited speakers for the beginning of the night. The speakers talked about the retrofitting of empty office spaces, guerrilla gardening and urban farming, and Sanderine van Odijk shared a story on a place in Amsterdam Noord she was working on as part of this small start-up called: Metabolic. She of course talked about the now famous Ceuvel, more than just an idea at that stage, but building hadn't started yet, though it was already a fleshed out design for a new urban circular urban environment, where creativity, art and sustainability would walk hand in hand. That sounded like the type of organization I'd want to help contribute to, to change our urban landscapes, make them fundamentally more sustainable, and to celebrate what makes us human, our ingenuity, creativity, and to have a place to dance and party, take people along for the ride and do it in a way that helps change the world for the better.

From a young age my father would take me fly fishing for brown trout in the chalk streams of Hampshire and for salmon in Scotland. From the river’s edge you couldn’t see any man-made structures or products except a few fence posts. It felt so calming and natural to be immersed in the beauty of Nature whilst all else fell away. I remember these ecosystems teaming with life: intricate insects we tried to imitate with our flies, beautiful kingfishers flying low to the water, otters playing in the reed beds, and of course the magnificent fish themselves. The old fishermen would tell me stories of their youth when the average catch for a day’s fishing would be ten times what it is now! This really troubled me, and I would continue to ask questions and read about why fish numbers were falling. I learnt about eutrophication from agricultural run-off, invasive alien species of fish, brutal industrial fishing techniques, and the other factors endangering these beautiful natural environments. My ‘aha’ moment came when I realised that all these detrimental factors were from human activity and were being driven by the profit incentive. Since then, I have dedicated my education and now my career to understanding why the economy that, should be our ally, is destroying Nature, the very thing on which we depend. With decades of work ahead of me I hope that I can contribute to reimagining this relationship so both humans and nature can flourish for centuries to come.

Seeing the high school graduation project of Boyan Slat on (micro)plastics in the ocean (later founder of The Ocean Cleanup) made me curious about the cause. Then the next year my own graduation project in high school; Together with my friend Nienke looking into the causes of plastic pollution in the ocean and in particular the usage of single-use plastic bags (this was before the law against free handout of plastic shopping bags). Creating a 2m diameter globe of plastic bags (not solid but if solid it would have been the equivalent of free plastic bags handed out in a week in Delft) to raise awareness in Delft and offer people a sustainable alternative; linnen bag with our design. Art for awareness we called the project :)

My aha-moment was gradual, and manifested itself in a variety of personal choices, including having a vegetarian diet, attempting to avoid air travel and choosing a sustainability related study topic. It was during the first months of that study, Future Planet studies, that Marjan Minnesma gave a lecture on climate change, that I realised that the extent of our current crises goes beyond what I could ever have imagined. For me, that lecture tied together the systematic failure of the current system, but also instilled in me the feeling that something could be done about it.

Once upon a time, I thought the tourism industry is my life. #myahamoment had 2 parts: a call to think and a call to act. One, a lecture on Tourism Destination Management course at Uni: you cannot overburden a destination with tourists if you want it to serve the community for long prosperous years. A resource needs to rest - so manage the footfall carefully. Here my head started turning - hey, wait, what with the other resources? What with the rest of the economy? What about humans abused by corporations? Why are we okay with overworking, overfishing, underpricing and polluting? Two. "Hey, I'm launching a social campaigning group on the campus, People and Planet. Come, there will be free pizza." YES, I went there for the pizza and because Paul was my pal. I thought activism was too much for me... and then I stayed, learned, and grew. The familiar rush of ideas: can work not work for everyone? What is a business' real responsibility? What is CSR? How do I help make the economy work better? At this stage, the fate of animals was relatively neutral to me, but the next realization came like an avalanche: there are no human rights if there is no environment to exercise them in. This is complex. I want to know more. I NEED to learn more. We need more people. And here I am, in an industry dominated by inspired, beautiful humans, where caring is not a weakness. Where power to the people, where there is hope. Thank you, my numerous mentors - and happy 10th birthday Metabolic!!!

When I was 9 years old, a volunteer from an environmental organization, Legambiente, came to my elementary school to talk about climate change, pollution, and how to take action. I very vividly remember being astonished by the exorbitant number of years that (back then) were thought to take plastic waste to decompose. I remember thinking: “there are some plastic bottles that have already been around since before I was born, and will be still around when I’ll be gone.” I’ll be forever grateful to that volunteer who planted a seed in my brain and inspired a young mind to take action. Since then, I have been in love with nature, in the picture you can see a happy (a little older than 9 y/o) me enjoying Sächsische Schweiz.

Ever since hiking through rice fields back in my travelling days, when I saw the amount of work, water and land (often on terraces build on hillsides) it took to produce a kilo of rice, I pay the roughly €1,70 for my packet of fair-trade-bio-rice and still feel some flashes of guilt when I have cooked too much rice again. Talking to people in small villages, where the rain patterns are directly related to their income or food supply for the year. This experience for me, really was an eyeopener of how disconnected our society is from the natural system that we are actually a part.

During the global lockdown, I secretly enjoyed the silver linings of quarantine. Less air and road traffic meant less pollution, which meant cleaner skies and rebounding nature. People even had more time for themselves and loved ones. It stunned me how quickly governments of the world shut down much of the economy with the snap of a finger. My mantra at that time became, “if leaders can collectively shift our daily lives in the face of a virus, they proved how they are just as capable of doing it in the face of a climate crisis.” I was angry that such a sweeping policy only seems to apply to one (albeit deadly) aspect of public health and not to the broader threat of pollution, resource scarcity, and human-induced climate change. I was simultaneously heartened by two buzzwords. First, essential workers. Those performing crucial jobs in sectors like healthcare, emergency services, or food services were no longer unsung heroes, but the people who really make the world turn. Second, the doughnut economy. My city, Amsterdam, announced during the pandemic that it would recover from the crisis and avoid future ones with a new economic model that aimed for creating a good life for everyone without operating beyond the “environmental ceiling.” It was then I realized that my own job at the time was not essential. It was also not aligned with my own deep-seated beliefs about minimizing waste and reducing consumption. And that had saddened me for a long time, but I didn’t have an exit strategy. In a way, I was lucky that my job was prohibited during lockdown. It offered time for reflection about what IS essential. And that is what sparked my quest to advance the science and technology that solves critical environmental and social issues..

I have a couple of moments. In my freshman year in college, I took a writing seminar on the environment and human values. Our professor asked us to play a game to measure our environmental footprint. I answered a couple of questions about my diet, travel, etc, and the result shows that if everyone lives like me, we would need 3.5 earths. It was a watershed moment for me to rethink about my lifestyle. When I went back to China during one winter break, I was shocked by the disgusting muddy color of the sky when landed in Beijing airport. Even though smog has already been quite terrible before I left home, the contrast has never been so clear without seeing the crystal clear sky in Pennsylvania. That's when I decided that I want to make my life useful and clean up this mess.

My aha moment began as a student pursuing what I thought was my chosen career path in molecular biology. That lab was where I was first taken aback by hockey stick graphs illustrating sharply rising trends of biological and social factors which were all contributing to the climate crisis: …population, CO2 concentration, temperature, exhausting resources like paper and water, transport, a loss of up to 75% of ocean biodiversity… Meanwhile there I was, in the biology lab growing cells. I realized that they also grow in similar, exponential patterns. I also knew a scientist has a narrow, five-minute window to harvest the cells before they all consume everything and die off. And that’s when it hit me. The very nature of exponential growth patterns is that they all end with a rapid collapse. My aha moment was that this dangerous pattern affects not just cells in a petri dish, but all of our living human systems as well. I knew my path was destined to change. Since that realization, I am forever committed to stopping that collapse on a planetary level, by addressing the broader system within the narrow window that we currently have.

My aha moment began as a student pursuing what I thought was my chosen career path in molecular biology. That lab was where I was first taken aback by hockey stick graphs illustrating sharply rising trends of biological and social factors which were all contributing to the climate crisis: …population, CO2 concentration, temperature, exhausting resources like paper and water, transport, a loss of up to 75% of ocean biodiversity… Meanwhile there I was, in the biology lab growing cells. I realized that they also grow in similar, exponential patterns. I also knew a scientist has a narrow, five-minute window to harvest the cells before they all consume everything and die off. And that’s when it hit me. The very nature of exponential growth patterns is that they all end with a rapid collapse. My aha moment was that this dangerous pattern affects not just cells in a petri dish, but all of our living human systems as well. I knew my path was destined to change. Since that realization, I am forever committed to stopping that collapse on a planetary level, by addressing the broader system within the narrow window that we currently have.

When my chemistry teacher at high school, who used to work at Shell, stopped the chemistry class and showed us the cradle to cradle documentary.

My aha moment happened on a bus while traveling through Patagonia back in 2017. I had just spent an amazing 6 months in Buenos Aires as part of my bachelor exchange, meeting lovely people, traveling non stop and enjoying delicious food - including: heaps of meat. So sitting on that bus, looking out the window at the stunning nature and landscapes of the Argentinian side of Patagonia, I stumbled upon a podcast that talked about the detrimental effects that our excessive meat production and consumption had on our planet, animal welfare and my personal health. It was that night that I couldn’t fall asleep because my mind was going all over the place, realizing all the things us humans were doing at the moment that wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run. And so that night, I decided that I had eaten enough meat for a lifetime during this exchange semester and that as a first step I’d become a vegetarian. It took me another 4 years to realize that following a fully plant-based diet is the single biggest way you as an individual can have a positive impact on this planet by reducing your CO2 footprint, land use and fresh water consumption. And let me tell you, living in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands in 2022, it’s never been easier to live a happy vegan lifestyle. And if something is easy AND has such a huge positive impact - why not simply do it? Even if it starts out with just one plant-based day a week. You don’t have to call yourself a vegan to make a positive change and contribute to building a better, more sustainable future.

During one of the geography lessons in high school, the teacher showed a clip from the movie An Inconvenient Truth. As a 13-year old, I remember being shocked by the simulations that showed that at a certain sea level rise, the Netherlands would be almost completely submerged. From then on, I started reading books and watching documentaries about climate change and discovered that the problem encompasses much more than just sea level rise. It is safe to say that after this realisation, my career path was determined.

I had been consulting on deeptech investing for technologies related to Climatetech and other technologies like in Synthetic biology for materials and other interventions. While assessing some of the ventures, I started to encounter readings from likes of Metabolic reports and articles, Daniel Christian Wahl's posts and articles, and just for validation of my thoughts I started mapping investment decisions across bioregional economic parameters and realised- Oh hell, tech can do but tech can only do this much, and why design level efforts, regernerative communities and works in that direction is needed first across bioregions and across public systems to really see the change we envisage. That changed my entire approach to viewing this space...sort of an enlightenment and have been engaged with consulting like yours or various Regenerative communities to understand better. Also - alongwith this Aha moment, came a realization that we have more coaches in this space than practioners so far. So a long way to go..

As a little boy I was fascinated by animals, not only the furry ones but also by bugs and micro-organisms. As a bedtime story my mother read to me from Desmond Morris’ Animal watching and I was, and still am, intrigued by the endless complexities in which life manifests. As a kid I would often walk eyes down, scanning the streets for waste or what I would regard as treasure: pieces of wire, screws or bolts, cogs and gears, and I would use them to build tiny electrical or mechanical contraptions. I fantasized that if I would ever travel all my luggage would fit in a tiny pouch, while all other needs would be drawn from my direct surroundings and my resourcefulness. Particularly the cleanliness of such a minimalist lifestyle attracted me. Instead of needing everything you can think of, I would just need what I could create. Joining one of the preppiest high schools of Amsterdam, my teenage insecurities led me off the path to refocus my ambitions on the capitalist dream: become rich by outsmarting the rest at the sad and predictable game called commerce. From my 15th until my early twenties is what I would regard as my dark ages. After I had spent a year in Delft as a fraternity member more so than a student, I reassessed what I valued in life. And it wasn’t having superficial conversations with other wasted dudes that were coincidentally pretty good at math. I moved back to Amsterdam, started a sustainability oriented study, and enrolled into some philosophy courses. During the bachelor I discovered that the beautiful concept of sustainability and complex systems actually encapsule the fascinations of my childhood. Being resource efficient, no-waste and respecting the complexity of life and its delicate balance is what makes sustainability the only path for me. Long after I had come from the dark ages, I saw an item of the American astronomer Carl Sagan on the famous pale blue dot photograph. To me this picture captures the essence of why I chose to stick to the path of sustainability.

When I was working in my university dining hall the summer after my first year in college, I was surprised to see that we were throwing away perfectly edible food at the end of the day. This inspired me to help set up a food recovery program with other students, where we collected all the surplus food and donated it to a local soup kitchen to help feed hungry people in our community. Around the same time I became an avid dumpster diver, going on a regular basis to grocery stores late at night to see what goodies I could find. All this food going to waste shocked me - how could our society create so much waste while so many people were going hungry? My passion to fix the food waste issue continued after graduation. One of my first jobs after college was working at Food Recovery Network, where we helped college students across the country set up food donation programs in their communities. While this was meaningful work, it also seemed like a band-aid over a much larger, systemic issue. Why was this food going to waste in the first place? Why are there so many people in the US who can't afford to buy food? These types of questions inspired me to go to graduate school and study industrial ecology, to try and fix our production and consumption systems and assess how to minimize waste while meeting the needs of people.

It happened in Cambodia. A while ago, I spent 1/2 year volunteering for a NGO in Cambodia called PEPY: Protect the Earth, Protect Yourself (pepyempoweringyouth.org). It was confronting to see how families live on very little. How repairing, reusing and sharing is a the heart of the communities' happiness. That experience helped me refocus my own values and forged a solid philosophical foundation. Coming back to Europe after that experience, I had a different way of looking at our ways of living, consuming, organizing our societies. I started getting involved in community initiatives in what was then called ' the sharing economy'. But I struggled to align my career path with my inner values. One day, I went to a conference in Lisbon and heard an incredible speech from Al Gore about the fact that 'there is no planet B'. He' s an incredible orator. Everyone in the public had goose bumps - and there were about 30 000 of us! He finished his speech with a poignant call which touched me deeply. He said: ' I am here to recruit you! yes YOU! Each and everyone of you in this auditorium has something to contribute. Whatever your professional skills are. I need you to come on board. I am recruiting you today' This was the moment I decided to rethink how I was spending my work time in order to really contribute to create a world that works within our planetary boundaries.

I guess the major tipping point was when I was offered to design a facility for fracking as part of my Bachelors course. Outright refused to do it, having realised that our generation shouldn't have to accept this kind of education when action is so desperately needed. Went to my head of department and asked them to propose projects that train engineers to be part of the solution not the problem.

The "aha moment" was a concatenation of experiences. As a child I was very fond of animals and I was fascinated by nature in general. For example, at elementary school I gave a presentation on the Greenhouse effect and acid rain, I also founded a "nature club", and with this club we went to pick up trash, we visited natural-park like zoos, etc. When I went through high school, I focused more on the technical school subjects and the arts. Soon after starting my bachelor Industrial Design Engineering, I began to see the connections between our economic system, the role of design and mass production, and the way we are turning the earth into a place of industrial production, not leaving room for nature. From that point on I tried to understand the system that we're in as well as possible, I used the projects and courses to find strategies for and expand my knowledge and skills on sustainability.

It was very gradual, lot's of documentaries, but maybe a lecture from the art collective that made me decide I wanted to intern with them

I was watching a documentary late at night in college called The 11th Hour. I realized quite deeply that addressing these challenges on a global scale was the only real thing worth doing -- everything else felt secondary at best. If we couldn't address these things as a species, then fungi deserved to inherit the earth.